New Phones

The Upcoming Smartphone Releases You Should Know About

Let’s get ready to ruuuuuuuumble! The next two weeks are shaping up to be seriously interesting as the mobile titans bring the latest in shiny goodness ringside in hopes of being the phone to beat for the holiday season. Thanks to supplier and PR incontinence, copious leaks give us a pretty clear picture of what’s to come in the next while.

First up is Nokia, with its Lumia 920 that Nokia it's hoping — praying, actually — will bring the Finnish company back from the dead. The Lumia is a sexy-looking touch-based Windows 8 phone that packs 32GB of storage, 1GB RAM, 1.5GHz dual-core CPU, 4” HD screen and an 8MP camera. Most intriguing and frightening is its wireless charging. If four phones receiving calls can pop a kernel of popcorn, I’d hate to see what four wirelessly charging Lumias could do to your balls.

Maybe Nokia has a secret plan to cook nearby competitors' phones. Either way, this one has to be successful or it's going to be a footnote in mobile history that will read “Hulk Hogan turns into token guy to beat up in wrestling match.”

In the next corner is Motorola. Feeling frisky from its hot Google-purchase injection, it is also hoping to breath some new life into its not-so-healthy brand. It is believed to be launching the Droid RAZR HD, a dual-core 1.5GHz S4 CPU, and, since mama Google now runs the show, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will likely add some spring to the RAZR HD’s step. The only oddity is that it will apparently sport a slightly weird-resolution 1196 x 720, leading us to wonder, “Was it really that hard to fit the extra 84 pixels into this bad boy?” Still, people likes them their RAZR, so this one will probably have a lot of fans.

In the third and well-funded corner is Apple. With rumor sites having pictures of everything but the iPhone 5’s box, the picture of this successor to the industry behemoth is pretty clear. On September 12th, Apple is going to be launching a metal unibody, 4-inch wide/tall-format screen that is going to be thinner than the previous-gen iHorn, thanks to new screen tech that eliminates the top glass layer currently used. On the tech side, apart from the CPU and GPU speed bumps, 4G LTE is finally coming and it also gets a weirdish 640 x 1136 resolution thanks to the taller screen format. It’s still up in the air as to whether Apple will ship the iPhone 5 with NFC (near-field communication). We’re just hoping Siri gets a sexytalk update with the updated iOS 6. It can get lonely on the road.

Arriving late to the fourth and final corner, is HTC, who just announced an event for the 19th. The Chinese heavyweight is set to launch three phones with Windows 8 on board: the Rio, the Accord and the Zenith. The latter is a true beast, with its 4.7-inch 720p screen, a quad-core CPU, 42Mbps HSPA+ connectivity, NFC support and 1GB of RAM. If you’re an Android lover, this looks like your contender.

So grab a Lumia wireless charger and some popcorn — it’s going to be a hell of fight. Maybe Xbox pepper spray lady will show up just after Apple smacks HTC with a chair. Dare to dream.